Last Stories and Other Stories

By William T. Vollmann

(Viking; 677 pages; $36)

No one ever accused Sacramento writer William T. Vollmann of being timid, unimaginative or short-winded. His choice of subjects in his voluminous writings has always been eclectic. Vollmann's brand of eccentricity dates back to his first published book, "You Bright and Risen Angels" (1987), 600-plus novelistic and allegorical pages, plus cartoons about war with insects, and probably go back to his first book, "about some astronauts who try to explore another solar system," he concocted as a first- or second-grader.

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Vollmann, a National Book Award winner, has written nine novels, six volumes of nonfiction and three collections of short stories. He's written about reincarnation, phantasmagoria, skinheads, whores and bag ladies in color-coded "Rainbow Stories" told in a way Hunter S. Thompson might have written them.

Near the beginning of this tome, the narrator WTV warns the reader: "This is my final book. Any subsequent production bearing my name will have been composed by a ghost," and he includes a set of supernatural axioms told to him by a ghost. This narrator, known by his initials, divides his stories into nine sections, with named locations in Bosnia, Italy, Norway, nearly everywhere, even in a place called Unknown. Conscientious ghost that he is, WTV gets Vollmann himself to provide a list of helpful sources and informative notes.

Vollmann's setup is so supernatural and whimsical almost to the point of being funny, that you're rendered vulnerable to the horror of the stories as you view this "wall of ill," as WTV puts it.

In the first one, a vignette called "Escape," a pair of Romeo and Juliet-like lovers, one a Muslim, the other a Serb, are killed on the Chetnik side of the bridge. Left rotting for days, the two are finally buried in one grave. This Sarajevo Romeo and Juliet, referred to in the next story, "Listening to the Shells," become a popular myth in Serbian folklore to the older generation. Legends like that, about families both alike in dignity but on different sides, cause the Catholic girl Dragica to question what she's been taught about war. She asks, "What is the truth? When you go to Catholic school, like I did, you hear only Croatian history, and you won't hear what bad things Croats did under Hitler." And that story's lost American journalist hopes that: "truth, whatever it was, could be communicated by him with sufficient eloquence ... then he would have accomplished something against war or at least for people." WTV writes that the dialogue in that story, about the accounts of lovers' deaths, is taken verbatim from his travels to the area. It's the sort of journalistic truth that WTV mixes with myth, humor and horror.

All of which gives him the opportunity to pose essential questions about the expulsion of truth in war. In "The Judge's Promise," for instance, is it permissible for our authorities to lie in the service of truth? Although that question is never fully answered (how could it be?), truth is an important ideal to these characters, to the narrator named WTV and presumably to Vollmann. Characters and narrator not only ask, "What is the truth?," they consider it the "most precious thing," and constantly use phrases like "truth be told" or "to tell the truth." For the young Kafkaesque Agustin in "Two Kings in Zinogava," it is a comfort to recognize evil and know "where the truth lays" as he swipes off Gaspar's head. Among other screams coming from hell, "you may hear Agustin weeping endlessly over his failure to live, while the head goes on laughing," WTV, says, though he admits he's never seen a ghost.

Reading these stories, sampling the delights of Paradise behind this wall of ill, you experience a simultaneous ghoulish and cerebral horror a la James and the odd Dickensian merriment, especially when you read that a character "disdained the riotous ghouls and vampires upstairs as much as ever" or when another confesses his intention to marry a ghoul or vampire, only to have the priest assure him that he would be doing no harm since such creatures lack souls. Enjoy "Last Stories," but, as the groom in "Widows Weeds" advises, say a "few Hail Marys" just in case."